You plucked up the courage to start your own small business and now you wish for as many people as possible to hear and see what you have to offer. The basis of business success lies in good marketing strategies since naturally, you cannot sell your products or services if nobody has heard of your brand.
Effective advertising is the key ingredient to the development of a successful and lucrative business just as much as the quality of what you offer. However, advertising campaigns can be quite expensive so if you are not in the position to allocate your budget in that direction, you will have to get creative. With that in mind, here are the top five ways in which you can promote your small business.
Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash
Improve your website
Your website is the face of your business and all links lead to it. It needs to complement your brand’s identity in every manner since, for instance, if you are selling toys for children, they and their parents might find a strict black and grey color pattern with a business-like product description unappealing. This is why the content of your website needs to be thought through in detail or otherwise, you will have a very high bounce rate.
One of the crucial components is the website’s speed because if your website is slow to load, you don’t stand a chance among the competition. For a faster and more responsive website, you need to opt for reliable web hosting services because this is how you would improve customer experience and motivate them to purchase on your site. Also, since the prospective customers most probably come to the website for a particular reason, make sure that the landing page is the page they are looking for (e.g. the page with a particular product) and not the home page. When it comes to navigation, it needs to be simple and the pages shouldn’t contain too many CTA buttons as it can be confusing.
Introduce e-mail marketing
Although numerous platforms have emerged over the years, the e-mail remains a stronghold for promoting businesses. If you haven’t already, you need to introduce e-mail campaigns into your marketing strategy or you will be missing out on a number of conversions and the first step is to make the ‘subscribe’ button plainly visible on the website. To motivate them to subscribe, you can offer them some incentive, such as a free e-book or something more related to your products because they would feel that you are not just in it for their money.
When it comes to the content, you shouldn’t send only Newsletters about promotions but also event invitations as well as information on new product launches. Unless you want your emails to be ignored, you cannot allow generic content but instead, you need to personalize it as much as possible. Also, to make each email engaging, it is advisable to add a CTA button. The copy shouldn’t be too wordy but short and catchy and self-explanatory. Naturally, don’t forget to match the landing page with the CTA or they will waste valuable time searching for that product and you might lose a prospective customer.
Leverage on social media
Social media presence has become obligatory for any small business looking to grow and advance so it is necessary to join the ride. Naturally, you would want to choose one or two platforms which suit your brand’s identity best so for instance, having a profile for your online lingerie store on LinkedIn would be a bit unusual. This decision will be made by your customers instead since you will want to ‘hang out’ in the same place they do.
Once you create social media profiles, make sure you have added the link to your website and also that you have social media buttons on your website which can lead them to your profiles. The posts you place on your profiles, depending on the network and your goals, can contain images of the products, discount offers, give away competitions, and a multitude of promotional ideas which be applicable to your products. Since social media channels are both volatile and flexible, you have a variety of promotional ideas to choose from.
Consider adding a blog section
The informative nature of blog posts made them a popular marketing means for business promotion. From a customers’ perspective, you taking the time to write about the field your product is from and not only using the blog for self-praise is a huge plus because it emphasizes the feeling that you are not in that line of business only to earn but to educate and help as well. From a business owner’s point of view, most blogging platforms are easy to use and in general, running a blog is not expensive.
Besides helping you to gain trust and credibility, it would also improve your search engine ranking which will make your website more visible. This would improve your website traffic and result in higher sales. What’s important to remember is that you would need a couple of posts right away because blogs with just one or two posts aren’t that popular. Once you create a few posts, you can decide on the frequency and stick to the plan. Also, don’t disregard users’ comments since their feedback can be helpful when it comes to improving your marketing strategy and the blog posts themselves.
Try out YouTube
YouTube can be used as a perfect medium to present your business to those who don’t know what you doin a few minutes. They should get the feeling that there is a team of hard-working people behind the brand so it creates an emotional bond with the brand. You can use videos to educate customers on how to properly use your products or give them a sneak peek into how they are made which usually raises interest with the audience.
Also, if you find out that some customers have made videos about your products, don’t hesitate to ask for permission to publish them on your channel since customers trust other customers and that increases your customer base and boost loyalty. You can get as creative as you wish with the type of videos you upload, and you can also broadcast certain contentlive, such as interviews with experts or answering different customers’ questions. This is also the perfect opportunity to show your own expertise in that field which will make the audience trust your brand even more.
Bily Bum is an electrical engineer, tech, and gaming fan with 15 years of experience in the technology world. He is also a contributor on site Technivorz.
